Celebrating John Glenn: Material Evidence of a Cultural Phenomenon

When John Glenn completed three orbits of the Earth on February 20, 1962, the United States celebrated the achievement.  President John F. Kennedy congratulated him from the Oval Office.  Glenn received a ticker tape parade in New York City.  The enthusiasm had its roots not only in the technological success of the mission but also in five years of Soviet “firsts” in spaceflight.  Although the United States had successfully launched its first satellite and a human suborbital flight, until Glenn’s mission true parity—an orbital flight with a human being—had not been achieved. 

Ordinary citizens wanted to mark their part in witnessing this history.  And commercial entities saw an opportunity to cash in on the new space craze.  This paper examines three of the less common material examples of the enthusiasm for Glenn’s accomplishment: a child’s bedroom blanket, a “Friendship 7” cookie jar, and Astroland, a space-themed amusement park founded in Coney Island, Brooklyn, in 1962.  As a part of a broader study of the cultural and material manifestations of enthusiasm for spaceflight, this paper advances the new field of cultural history of aviation and space through a deep reading of material culture.  What can the artifacts of Glenn’s achievement reveal about how people embraced, owned, and commodified space enthusiasm? 

Photographs of the relevant artifacts, including an eight-foot-wide lighted turning star from the Astroland amusement park entranceway sign, all held in the national collection of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, will illustrate this talk.